Northeast Asia Development Forum to boost Russia-China regional ties

“We know of Russia’s great scientific-technical potential, especially in the Far East and Siberia,” Zeng Wei, Shenyang Party Secretary

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SHENYANG, September 26 (Itar-Tass) — The sixth Northeast Asia Development Forum is for the first time fully devoted to stronger regional cooperation between Russia and China.

“We know of Russia’s great scientific-technical potential, especially in the Far East and Siberia,” Zeng Wei, Shenyang Party Secretary, said in his opening remarks to the forum that opened in Shenyang, China’s northeast Liaoning province on Wednesday.

“Of late we’ve done much to develop our regions and got an opportunity to take our trade relations (with Russia) to a new level,” he said.

“We plan to more actively study such cooperation and will encourage our enterprises to enter the Russian market for giving a new impetus to regional development,” he said.

Russian Consul-General in Shenyang, Sergey Podberezko, recalled that “the Russian authorities attach great importance to the development of investment cooperation with foreign countries.”

“A strategic task for the country’s economic modernization was set, and to translate it into reality without attracting advanced foreign experience, technologies and capital is impossible,” he said.

“In this respect it is especially important to step up relations with Chinese partners, who show an example of galloping modernization, when industries that were based on the centrally planned economy before are being reformed now,” Podberezko said.

“It is necessary to more fully tap the investment potential of Russian regions, first of all Siberia and the Far East, to ensure balanced development of the domestic economy,” the consul-general said. “In this respect cooperation with China can become an irreplaceable source for renovation and modernization of Russia’s economy. Russian regions simply have no right to lose this chance.”

Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization last August “unveiled new opportunities for China’s companies as concerns trade and investments into big infrastructure projects on the territory of Russia,” the deputy head of Russia’s trade mission in China, Sergei Sizov, said.

“Of late technoparks and industrial zones in Russia, where domestic and foreign companies produce an extensive range of machine-building and engineering goods under preferential tax rules, have been widely spread in Russia,” he said. “I hope that Chinese manufacturing enterprises will eye opportunities for working abroad, including Russia.”